Back in late January, the CSU Law SBA submitted its proposal on paid externships to the Ad Hoc Committee on Externships. Since then, while no decisions have been made, and while we continue to be concerned about the lack of student involvement in the decision-making process, we remain optimistic that CSU Law may finally reach a positive resolution on this essential issue.
On January 29th, 2024, after months of research, meetings, and surveys, SBA passed a comprehensive proposal calling on CSU Law to:
Lift the ban on paid externships.
Lift the ban on externship placements in private firms.
Lift the ban on externship placements at current and previous employers.
From there, the process passed from SBA to the school. Instead of the Curriculum Committee, the issue is being evaluated by the Ad Hoc Committee on Externships, a new committee convened by Dean Lee Fisher and chaired by Professor Robert Triozzi. SBA registered its disagreement with this process, since the Ad Hoc Committee has no student representatives, but remained ready and willing to work with the committee.
Shortly after the Ad Hoc Committee was formed, Professor Triozzi reached out to SBA, asking us to convene a group of students to meet with the Ad Hoc Committee to discuss the proposal. SBA did so—the group included Jalela Jallaq, Philipp Corfman, Holly Lloyd, Annaliese Nunes, Lauren Bayerl, and Emily Forsee. We then scheduled a meeting with the Ad Hoc Committee for February 23rd.
This meeting was an opportunity for both sides to fully articulate their views and begin to search for potential solutions. Student representatives listed our views, with which CSU Law students will likely be familiar. We argued that the paid externship ban is a severe economic burden on students, stifles students’ careers, severely disadvantages JDO students, is not pedagogically necessary, and is nearly universally opposed by the student body.
The faculty and administrators in the Ad Hoc Committee raised a number of concerns, some of which were familiar to us and some of which were new. They noted the potential risks of conflicts of interest, student exploitation, and a weakened pedagogical value for paid sites where supervisors have an economic interest in results from the extern.
In our (the student group’s) view, the most salient concern the Ad Hoc Committee raised was the risk of administrative burden. If the school immediately opened the floodgates to any private firm to apply for an externship site, we would not have the administrative capacity to deal with the resulting flood of applications. Each site needs to be appropriately vetted to ensure that it meets the ABA standards for experiential learning, and this would be impossible with an uncontrolled deluge of private firm externship applications.
We sympathize with this challenge, but believe it is surmountable. So, we drafted a memorandum listing several non-mutually-exclusive methods by which the school can incrementally introduce private firm placements without overburdening our administrative capacity, including:
Setting a hard cap on the number of new sites introduced each year.
Creating a rigorous application process to weed out substandard sites.
Limiting eligibility for private firm placements by student need.
We submitted this memorandum to the Ad Hoc Committee on Wednesday, March 6th, and Professor Triozzi assured us that the group would take these options into consideration.
We are now awaiting a response from the Ad Hoc Committee, including where they are in their discussions and whether there will be another meeting with the student group.
While we remain concerned about the closed nature of the Ad Hoc Committee’s deliberations over this issue, and while there have been no promises or decisions made, we are nevertheless optimistic about the future of paid externships. Several members of the Ad Hoc Committee appeared to be open to at least lifting the ban on compensation for current externship sites, and to lifting the ban on private firm placements on some incremental basis. While uncertainty remains, we are optimistic that CSU Law is closer than it has been in years to finally reaching a resolution on the issue of paid externships.
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